It's just words and pictures

Monthly Archives: July 2011

Post navigation

Don’t get me wrong. On the whole, I’m pretty happy with Flickr. It does a decent job. But Thomas Hawk got me thinking recently with his enthusiastic (Is Thomas ever anything but enthusiastic?) promotion of 500px. It does a nice job of showing off your photos, but one of the things that’s different about it, at least for now, is the focus on top quality photography.

There’s plenty of top quality photography on Flickr. But there’s also a lot of mediocrity, and quite a lot of complete rubbish. I try not to post too much complete rubbish, but I sometimes do, because I want to show something I saw and just didn’t get a good photo of. Much of the photography I post would come under the heading of ‘mediocre’. Not bad, but not really ‘portfolio’ stuff. I’m happy posting it to Flickr, but would feel bad about uploading it to 500px. It would lower the tone of the site, and I don’t want to do that.

It would be good to have somewhere to point someone who doesn’t already know my photography, to show what I have done. The best pictures I’ve taken. Like a portfolio, rather than introducing someone to my most recent photos, which may happen to be a bit, well, crappy.

It’s certainly good to have somewhere to share the photos I’m taking day-to-day. Some are better than others, but I don’t want to only share the very best. I want to show people the reasonably decent stuff too.

I also sometimes want to share photos that really aren’t very good. I may have spent an hour trying to get a shot of a swift flying past our window, and failed, so I want to share the blurred black shape that was the best shot I managed to get, to tell the story. Maybe there was an interesting bit of street art, and I want to show it, but screwed up the one photo I took. I still want to be able to show these off, but perhaps don’t want people thinking I’m actually happy with this sort of shot.

500px is pretty good for that first category, for showing off those portfolio pieces that you’d want to show anyone while modestly saying “Well, you know, I dabble a little in photography – never really taken anything good. What these old things? Well, that’s very kind of you, but…”

Flickr is good for the second category. It doesn’t show the photos off well enough for the first category, though, and the default view is just your n most recent photos. Sometimes, my last few photos weren’t very good. It has a bit of a work-around for the final category. I’ve seen some people who will post their single best photo from a set as an actual public photo, then post several more as private photos, so other users don’t see them. They then add comments to the public photo, with small versions of the other photos. People can see all the photos if they want to, but the photostream only contains the very best. Neat trick, but only works in some circumstances, and it’s extra work. It also means people you can’t link to many of your photos, and people can’t comment on them.

For the third category, the really rather bad photos, I just upload them with the rest, but I don’t really like to.

The obvious answer would be to use 500px for what it does well, and Flickr for what it does well, and either compromise Flickr with the bad shots, or stick them somewhere else – maybe even leaving them on the hard drive, tale untold. One problem with that is that I’m lazy. I can export a batch of pics to Flickr quite easily. I can upload there directly from my iPhone for pics taken there. Adding another step to send a couple of the best each time to a different site is likely to get put off, and never done. If I also upload them to Flickr, they’ll be in more than one place, which doesn’t feel right to me. If I don’t, then the majority of people, who will only look on Flickr, won’t ever see my best photos.

I think the more practical answer for me is to keep using Flickr, and live with its faults. Maybe something will come along that beats it firmly enough to take over, but the number of users Flickr has causes a lot of momentum. Maybe Flickr will get the work put into it at some point to sort out its problems, and really bring it up to date. Unfortunately, the former is looking more likely than the latter these days.